Top programming languages of 2020

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Jamie McKane

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Top programming languages of 2020

WakaTime has released its data on the most-used programming languages, code editors, and operating systems for 2020.

In contrast to indices such as PYPL and TIOBE, WakaTime's ranking is based on the number of hours developers have spent coding in a programming language.
 
In before usual troll posts that has become accustom on this forum
 
Languages:
Typescript +8%, Python +5% and Vue.js +4%

Editors:
VS Code +46%, IntelliJ +7% and Chrome +5%.

-2% for PyCharm and no data for Wing Pro.
 
Genisys said:
In before usual troll posts that has become accustom on this forum
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Well, a smilar article will appear at least two or three more times this year. Allow people to post from under the bridge for at least one of those articles.
 
I for one have been encouraged by the jQuery stigma that seems to have built up the last year or two. "No jQuery, only vanilla JS" has become a common thing to disclose.
 
Having "Other" as the second most popular language (in this case, a grouping of languages) looks really wrong. It suggest that either there are a lot more esoteric languages than we think, or they don't really know what languages a large percentage of people are using.
 
Ancalagon said:
Having "Other" as the second most popular language (in this case, a grouping of languages) looks really wrong. It suggest that either there are a lot more esoteric languages than we think, or they don't really know what languages a large percentage of people are using.
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C, C++, Matlab, and R are not on the WakaTime list but feature on the TIOBE or PYPL indices (or both). I also couldn't help but wonder if WakaTime wasn't properly tracking those languages for some reason.
 
All that WakaTime is actually giving is a breakdown of who is using WakaTime. I expect that this group is highly non-representative of the general programming population.
 
cguy said:
All that WakaTime is actually giving is a breakdown of who is using WakaTime. I expect that this group is highly non-representative of the general programming population.
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Sure, but a similar argument can be made for the other indices. They are each biased in their own way.

WakaTime claims to have 250k users, which is nothing to sneeze at, but yes it is fair to say that the people using WakaTime will be those who have a need to track how much time they spend coding like freelancers, consultants, contractors, and people who have to fill in corporate time sheets.
 
TIL that Markdown and Yaml are programming languages.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: Jan
Jan said:
Sure, but a similar argument can be made for the other indices. They are each biased in their own way.

WakaTime claims to have 250k users, which is nothing to sneeze at, but yes it is fair to say that the people using WakaTime will be those who have a need to track how much time they spend coding like freelancers, consultants, contractors, and people who have to fill in corporate time sheets.
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There is also no way that any company I’ve ever worked for would allow a service to be installed that tracks employee time, language or other info and streams it to the internet.

I think this is much more likely to be biased for reasons such as the above, or due to lack of support from IDEs (vim plug-in management is awful), etc. Also some industries (like mine), couldn’t care less a about how much time you spend coding, since how do you come up with anything sensible when you’re writing C/C++, with some interactive console R, GDB, reading logs in vim, processing data in Juyter notebook, chatting about the best way to resolve or design something, watching GUIs to monitor or debug live behavior, studying/researching new algorithms, reading papers, supercomputer load analysis, etc. Essentially, I think there are entire sectors that would just throw this type of analysis out completely and not bother.

On the other hand, just about everyone searches for programming related answers, on an overwhelmingly dominant search engine. I am sure that different languages have different search densities per capita, so I am sure their is bias, and also things like GitHub makeup will also be biased for similar reasons, but I am fairly sure the stats here are completely out of whack. I doubt they consider anybody working at a big tech company even due to security policies.
 
Jan said:
C, C++, Matlab, and R are not on the WakaTime list but feature on the TIOBE or PYPL indices (or both). I also couldn't help but wonder if WakaTime wasn't properly tracking those languages for some reason.
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So its worthless?

I mean, if they don't track C or C++, the data is simply not relevant to the real world.
 
Ancalagon said:
So its worthless?

I mean, if they don't track C or C++, the data is simply not relevant to the real world.
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None of the data on these lists are relevant in the real world. Nobody goes and says "hey, TIOBE says LangX is popular we should switch to it".
 
Hamster said:
None of the data on these lists are relevant in the real world. Nobody goes and says "hey, TIOBE says LangX is popular we should switch to it".
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What? That’s why I started using C!
 
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